Teachers and the Tests

New York and Los Angeles are moving ahead with plans to use standardized testing designed to grade teachers as well as students. In Public Agenda's research, we've found that it isn't so much that teachers don't think tests can play a role in grading teachers – but they do say other ideas are more effective.

Nearly all teachers (92 percent) rated the level of student interest and engagement as an excellent or good indicator of teacher effectiveness. Teachers also gave excellent or good ratings to how much their own students learn compared with other students (72 percent) as well as feedback from principals and administrators (70 percent).

While more than half (56 percent) of the teachers we surveyed said how well students perform on district’s standardized tests is also an excellent or good indicator, the intensity of their support is much lower. Only 12 percent of teachers gave standardized tests the top "excellent" rating, lower than they gave any of the other measures of effectiveness. By contrast, 46 percent say student engagement is an "excellent" indicator. And 75 percent of all teachers said that student test scores are a lot less important than other measures.

And newer teachers are actually less likely to see standardized tests as a good indicator than more experienced educators. Half of those who have been teaching for less than five years say student performance on standardized tests is a fair or poor indicator. Only 32 percent of teachers who have been teaching more than 20 years agree.

None of this settles the question of what really is the best way of grading teachers—it can only suggest what scales teachers would choose for themselves. But the data can tell us which ideas teachers would be receptive to and which they might resist-- and they do resist the idea of test scores as the only indicator, or even the most important indicator, of how a teacher performs.